The Decibel - What you need to know about the Ontario election

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

This Thursday, Ontario voters head to the polls for a provincial election that Premier Doug Ford called more than a year early. The threat of tariffs looms large, overshadowing traditional election issues like health care and affordability.Jeff Gray is The Globe’s Ontario politics reporter. He’s on the show to talk about how tariffs shaped this election, how the parties are approaching the challenges facing Ontario and how Ford’s opponents are dealing with the uphill battle against him.Enter this Decibel survey: https://thedecibelsurvey.ca/ and share your thoughts for a chance to win $100 grocery gift cardsQuestions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

This Thursday, Ontario goes to the polls. But ever since PC leader Doug Ford called the election about a month ago, it hasn't been top of mind for many Ontario voters. It's the first winter election anybody can remember. It's a snap election that the Premier Doug, called early, more than a year early. That's Jeff Gray, The Globe's Ontario politics reporter. And it's certainly, I think most people would agree, has flown under the radar, partly because the radar is currently trained on Washington and President Donald Trump and his threat

to impose tariffs and possibly use economic force to absorb the whole country. That has been Doug Ford's narrative the whole time. He's portrayed himself with sort of a one-track message. I am the guy who can fight and protect Ontario and protect Ontario jobs from Donald Trump. Today, Jeff is here to talk about what you might have missed in this election, the role those potential US tariffs have played, and how all that attention on tariffs have left the opposition parties fighting an

uphill battle. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Jeff, great to have you back on the show. Thanks for having me, Maddika. So Doug Ford has been Premier since 2018. Just generally speaking, how would you characterize his time in office? Well, he comes into power in 2018 very quickly. He took over the leadership of the PC party,

the Progressive Conservative Party, after a scandal sunk Patrick Brown, his predecessor. So the party had a lot of people that had been brought into it by Patrick Brown, and they take power in 2018, and a whole bunch of things go wrong very quickly. Sort of a break things, ask questions later, approach to government,

appointing a whole bunch of people critics called called cronies and and people with relationships with the premier or his staff to physicians. A whole bunch of messy things happened. Their first budget had a bunch of cuts in it that weren't spelled out very well and lots of things started to sort of come out of the woodwork. Lots of problems. But of course he does win another majority in the next election in 2022, right? He does. And then in the second term, we get the green belt fiasco. That's the protected land around the GTA. Doug Ford said, I'm not going to allow developers to build on this land. And then he did. And he did it very quickly. There were resignations. The housing minister resigned. A staffer that had been involved in a very hasty selection process for land, all land

that was chosen that was owned by developers with links to the government. And that's now under investigation by the RCMP. So that's one of the things the opposition has said. This election really is not about Donald Trump or Doug Ford needing a new mandate to deal with the threat of tariffs. It's really about getting ahead of the RCMP. That's what the opposition has said. But despite all these issues that you brought up here, Jeff,

Doug Ford is leading in the polls. He looks set to win a third majority. Let's look at kind of the landscape here. And I think we should first just maybe go through who's running against Doug Ford because he is taking up a lot of air time. So could you just very quickly go through the other party leaders and who they are?

So you have Marge Stiles, the leader of the opposition, the leader of the NDP, a former union policy advisor and school trustee who's been an MPP in Toronto. Life in Ontario is harder than it should be. Well, unless you're one of Doug Ford's friends, right, that he makes those deals with. And you have liberal leader Bonnie Cromby, the former mayor of Mississauga,

who just also took over her party leadership and has been the target of attack ads from Doug Ford since he took over in 2023. Bonnie Cromby's agenda is clear. More money in the government's pocket, less money in yours. That's why Ontario can't afford carbon tax queen Bonnie Crombie. And then you have Green leader Mike Schreiner, MPP for Guelph, that party's first ever MPP, and he has two seats in the legislature

and is hoping to add to that. Doug Ford works for Doug Ford. Ontario Greens work for you on February 27th. Let's go back to the reasons behind the election here. So as you mentioned, we didn't need to have an election in Ontario until mid next year, but Doug Ford has called this election saying he needs a new mandate to deal with the threat of tariffs

and everything that's happening out of the US. Of course he does have a majority, but how is Ford actually proposing to deal with the tariffs that might come out of the US? So when this election campaign got underway, and before it really did, and he started to sound like it was already underway before he pulled the trigger, he talked about needing a new mandate

to spend tens of billions of dollars to cushion the blow of US tariffs and that he would tell us about this plan as the campaign unfolded. The plan has since come out. It involves $10 billion in sort of deferred taxes, involves another four or five billion dollars in some sort of aid to companies. It's not spelled out in detail. Some other changes, some more money for infrastructure, this kind of thing to stimulate the economy.

The number the government uses, they say they're gonna spend $40 billion. Some of that is not actually money that they're writing checks, it's deferred taxes or whatever, but that's their number. And Ontario stands to be hit harder than a lot of other places in the country because of its manufacturing, the auto sector,

huge components in the Ontario economy. So he said that, so if I'm gonna do that, I need the support of the voters. Now, of course, the government had proposed to spend billions of dollars during COVID, didn't need a new election, then he has a majority, he can pass a budget and spend whatever he likes. So I think a lot of people would sort of say, then he has a majority, he can pass a budget and spend whatever he likes.

So I think a lot of people would sort of say, the opposition in particular saying, you've already got a majority, you don't need to do this. He then sort of changed the line a little bit as the election got in the way and said, well, Donald Trump's not going away, he's gonna be around for four years, I need a strong four-year mandate

to be here to fight him for those four years. Okay. Now, none of this actually checks out. If you check, the idea of an early election has been floating around. It's been discussed by him and his advisors since at least last spring. And we know that because when he decided to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to accelerate the sale of beer in corner stores in Ontario. Right. He wouldn't answer the question asked, he was asked several times, you know,

are you ruling out an early election? Will you have an election on schedule, on the legislated schedule, which was supposed to be June, 2026. And he wouldn't answer that question. So, we knew that that was under discussion then, but that was long before Donald Trump won the presidency. Okay.

Ford has been talking a lot about the issue of tariffs during this election. How have the other party leaders responded to this issue? How are they talking about tariffs? So they have also said many of the same things. Gonna need to spend lots of money. People are talking about inter-provincial trade barriers. They need to come down.

That's been a point that many people have made. Not a lot of specifics, but suffice to say, whatever government takes the reins, in Ontario, we'll have to do a whole bunch of things on an emergency footing to shore up the economy when it's facing tariffs. On the assumption that, of course, the tariffs don't last forever

because you can't spend money forever the way that they're proposing. So, but they also, in the same breath, present themselves as the same kind of defender of the province, but quickly wanna talk about other things, the healthcare system, the problems in housing, things where the government is more vulnerable because the message that's come out

at Doug Ford, the discipline, the ads, he's been on Fox News, he's been on CNN, he's got the hat, Canada's not for sale, all that stuff is, it's a pretty powerful message and it's pretty hard for the opposition parties to break through that. Yeah. And so when we're talking about these benefits around these potential tariffs, like are the

parties actually talking about cost of living for Ontarians as well? Because this is a huge issue in the province right now that a lot of people are thinking about. Yeah. I mean, Doug Ford has made that a message for a long time. He always talks about the license plate fees that he got rid of in 2022 and other things like that. But as far as the sort of the cost of living message,

the other parties have also jumped onto that. Bonnie Crombie and the Liberals have proposed a middle income tax cut. They've also talked about cutting the HST on home heating. And the NDP have proposed a grocery rebate for middle and low income families to compensate you for the rising cost of groceries. So that anxiety that people have, I mean, every politician talks about that issue and

they have definitely talked about that issue a lot, all the parties have. On the other hand, the campaign is really dominated by Donald Trump. I mean, that that's real. He's not on the ballot, but it's that's where everyone's mindset is, I think, to the extent that people are following the fact that there's an election at all in Ontario. We'll be back after this message. So, Jeff, tariffs have been a big issue in this election, the preoccupation with what's happening in the states. Another top issue, though, is health care.

The liberals in particular have been running on this. They had a big ad campaign, and Bonnie Crombie even launched her campaign initially with a ball cap, and that said, real leaders fix health care. So like really hammering home this message. What is the state of healthcare in Ontario and why is it so top of mind in this election? All the three big parties that we're talking about have said very similar things about what they're gonna do.

So the problem is we have a personnel shortage. So you have rural ERs closing down or shutting for you know, at 5pm or shutting for the weekend, because they're out there lacking staff. You have sort of a wave of family doctors who are retiring, you have trouble attracting family doctors, both to family medicine, a lot of people who study medicine are going to other paths, and getting them to practice in places where we need them,

Northern Ontario, rural areas, that's where the shortage is really being felt. Other areas with population growth pressures too. And so you have the OMA, the Ontario Medical Association, says there's 2.5 million Ontarians without a family doctor and growing. All three parties say, yes, we're going to get more doctors. We're going to spend more money to do it.

And we're going to get you a family doctor in the next few years. Has this hurt the PC's record though? Because I mean, they've been in power since 2018. All of these things seem to kind of fall under their jurisdiction, right? Right. I mean, certainly you hear that critique, but you look at the polls and you don't see it. And right before the election,

the conservatives trotted out Jane Philpott, former Liberal cabinet minister, former dean of medicine at Queens University, and they have appointed her to this sort of blue ribbon fix healthcare task force plan. And then the plan is health, sort of health teams and other changes, as well as attracting, you know, more foreign trained doctors,

getting more people to go into family medicine, they're opening spots, opening new medical schools, all to get more doctors into the into the system. And in the debate, Bonnie Crombie used that as one of her attack lines against Doug Ford. Bonnie, what I will tell you, there's a reason why Dr. Jane Philpott, a liberal minister. Both Bonnie Crombie and Marge Stiles, the NDP leader, the liberal leader, both have said the same stuff. They have the added kicker, which is,

you've had almost seven years, why haven't you done this? Yeah. Let me also ask you about housing too, because this is a big issue in Ontario as well. What has the Ford government's record been on housing? So, starting early on, around 2019, they started bringing in a whole bunch of changes to the way planning is done, housing is approved, and they set a goal of building 1.5 million

homes by 2031. Unfortunately though, they've run into some trouble. Part of it is sort of the economy and interest rates shooting up. That really hurts new construction. So they had these aggressive targets for municipalities and an aggressive target for the province of how many housing starts they wanted. And they weren't going to get anywhere near that. You know, if you do the math, you need 150,000 on average housing starts a year to get to

1.5 million over 10 years. And Ontario hasn't built anywhere near that amount in decades. And while they did have some success and got pretty close to 100,000, things have since sunk back down and the projections don't look good. Now, the government has moved the goalposts on housing starts to try and show that it's going to hit this 1.5 million homes goal by including long term care home beds as housing starts. Yeah, and they are building more long term care beds,

but they're counting those as homes. And they also faced a whole bunch of criticism for the changes they did make to the rules, the planning rules, the housing policies. A lot of them were aimed at destroying the regime that had been built up by the previous government to control suburban sprawl, to try and get municipalities to build

more densely, to preserve farmland. We've already talked about the green belt, but there's more to it than the changes. So they've made a bunch of changes that have basically made it much easier for developers to have farmland designated for housing in the future, which means that the speculator that owns that farmland instantly makes money because it's worth so much more when it's designated for housing without having to build any homes.

And so all those changes have made it easier to plan for future growth in the suburbs, but not a lot of changes have been directed to making it so that cities are forced to build more densely inside cities. They have done some things. There's a plan, the Transit Oriented Communities Plan, where they pop really big buildings

on top of transit stations. That has gotten up a lot of people's noses because they sort of override municipal planning processes, which is something they do in a lot of other ways. So the result of all this critics say has been a lot of chaos and not a lot of housing. What about the other parties? Like we're talking about the liberals, the NDP. We also haven't mentioned the Green Party yet either. What have they said about this issue of housing? All of them have pretty bold housing platforms in varying levels of detail. In a nutshell, one of the problems that the government was trying to tackle are these

things called development charges. Those are the fees that municipalities charge developers so they can pay for roads and pipes and things that you need to have new houses. And those have been shooting up for the past number of years, very, very high, you know, in some places, 150, $170,000 for a single housing unit. So the complaint was it's for putting all these costs on people who are trying to buy new homes. So Bonnie Crombie and the Liberals have said, we're going to get rid of development charges for certain housing units under 3,000 square feet and pay for the pipes and roads and all that stuff directly from the province.

The NDP proposed basically getting right into the middle of building housing, having a public agency and building affordable housing. They've also proposed really strict rent control. The liberals wanna do rent control too, but it's more of a phased in type of rent control, similar to what we have and what we used to have in Ontario, whereas the NDP would make it hard, if not impossible, for landlords to, even in a rent-controlled apartment,

when you leave, they can raise the rent, they would even make that not possible. And the Green Party also has a detailed housing plan that would bring back some of these rules about building more densely, more environmentally. And polls show that people really care about this issue, particularly young people who have been shut out of the housing market. And there was tons of noise about this

over the past several years, but an election campaign in February and people are distracted and worried about what's happening in the US and it hasn't gotten a lot of oxygen. distracted and and worried about what's happening in the US and It hasn't gotten a lot of oxygen Yeah, huh, and you mentioned friend control, of course Jeff I of course for did change the rent control rules in 2018 when he came into power and that increased rent for a lot of people Yeah, we touched on the green belt saga before I just want to come back to this very quickly because you mentioned there's an RCMP

Investigation into this. It seems like a big deal. Has this had an effect on the campaign? It doesn't seem to. I mean, this is the strange thing about Doug Ford is that with the green belt, the scandal, we had reports by the auditor general, the integrity commissioner pointing to all the problems

with the way this land was selected. It was largely at the behest of a small group of developers who wanted their land freed up, wanted greenbelt land to be where they could build. But, you know, Doug Ford then apologizes. So, you know, would that have an effect? It might, but at the moment, it's not really front of mind

because all these other issues seem to be in the way. And we have this, Doug Ford's ability to sort of apologize and move on. I mean, during the debate, he even said, he said it so bluntly. I said I was, then I wasn't, and I went ahead and did it. But in saying that, in saying that, let's give him an opportunity to respond.

You know something, I apologize to the people. Unlike any of you, when you do something, you don't want to apologize. I apologize to the people. We're moving forward, we're building homes. For some reason, you know, he apologizes. I mean, you see the polls, the polls show us that people are still, you know,

majority of decided voters, well, not a majority, plurality, are likely gonna vote for Doug Ford. Well, in our last few minutes here, Jeff, let's go back to these polls because the latest Nanos polls that we're looking at, and these kind of change day to day, but we see the PCs at about 44%,

liberals at around 29, the NDP around 20, and the Greens around five. So of course, looks like we're poised for another PC majority. But I guess I want to talk about this race to second place, though, because the liberals are ahead of the NDP right now. And the NDP has been the official opposition since 2018 in the province. So could that actually change in this election?

It could. But it is very hard to say just based on the popular vote. In the last election in 2022, But it is very hard to say just based on the popular vote. In the last election in 2022, the NDP won 31 seats and the liberals won eight, but they both had the same percentage of the popular vote at about 24%. Whereas Doug Ford won 83 seats and had a majority. Okay, so the NDP just had a more efficient vote,

it sounds like. They had it spread out over more ridings than the liberals. Yeah, the liberals have a more concentrated support in ridings that they won. And it's one of the problems with the first pass, the post system. And so the question is, can they overcome that with a better strategy, diverting volunteers to ridings that are close that they might put over the edge rather than keeping resources

in a place they're going to win anyway? And what happens to NDP support? The PC party has made a big deal about how they have these trades and construction unions supporting them. They like what they've done with spending on skills training for the trades. They like all this infrastructure spending. I think they like Doug Ford and his brand and this all. So this has been a long strategy that they've had of appealing to those private sector unions.

Whereas the NDP traditionally would have support from those unions, but also public sector unions. The NDP traditionally has more volunteers, can knock on more doors and get their vote out better. So yeah, the race for second place. No one will admit they're in a race for second place, of course. But that will be something to watch.

If Doug Ford wins a ton more seats, who will be there standing up in question period to push the opposition against him? And will it be Maart Stiles again or will it be Bonnie Crumpy? We don't know. Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Rammann-Wilms. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. You can subscribe to The Globe and Mail at globeandmail.com slash subscribe. Thanks so much for listening.